 Hello and welcome everyone excited to get started with virtual instruction with common lit My name is Netta Anna Sarri and I am the technology projects coordinator for OTAN This webinar is being recorded. Thank you so much for attending and I'm handing it over to Rob from common lit Hey there. It's it's great to meet all of you. Thanks so much for coming to today's training I'd love to just give you guys a little bit of background on myself And I'll have my my co-presenters introduce themselves as well. So my name is Rob Fleischer I'm the director of school partnerships at common lit and before I worked at common lit I was a middle and high school special education teacher So I'm just really excited about our program and telling you more about how common lit supports students of all ages all throughout the United States and I'm here today with Two of my colleagues Brynn and Amanda and I'll have them just quickly introduce themselves as well Hi everybody as Rob mentioned my name is Brynn I run our district success team at common lit and I work with a lot of our school and district partners That are looking to train their teachers and roll out common lit. So I'm excited to be with you all today Perfect. All right. I'd love to just first to start off by oh, sorry, man. I thought we lost you Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm on the school partnerships team as well. I Used to teach for special education. I'm an early at an early elementary I'm really excited to get to know you all today and looking forward to seeing your questions on Q&A Awesome. All right With that, we're just gonna start off with a very quick agenda. So, you know what to expect from today's training First we're just gonna start by doing a brief overview of common lit We'll tell you a little bit more about our literacy resources then we're we'll kind of walk through the website and we'll start by Choosing a great lesson from common lits platform We'll show you some of the different lessons that common lit offers Then we'll show you we'll do some work where we'll show you how to create a class and get your students set up on common lit then We'll we'll talk a little bit about what it's like to assign a lesson to students What does it look like from the students platform? What are the lesson planning resources that a teacher has access to as well? We'll cover and then we'll talk about what it's like to grade a lesson What data do you see as a teacher? What data does a student do the students see? How can they track their own progress and then we'll finish up with just like some next steps And ways that you can get started with common lit. So just a little bit more about common lit common It's a completely free reading program for That has over 2,000 reading lessons in both English and Spanish It's completely free for students and teachers and families The way that it works is that you can choose a lesson from our website We have short stories poems nonfiction articles the difficulties of these lessons starts at a at a grade level 3 Equivalency and it goes up to adult level literature You'll see Once we'll talk a little bit about what's included in the library in a little bit You can download just about any lesson from our platform You can also share every lesson on common lit with your students through the common lit platform Well, each lesson comes with lesson planning resources for teachers and a series of Tools that students can use to help scaffold instruction and help them effectively read common lit reading lessons The next is that Students and teachers can both track their progress on common lit Teachers are able to complete all of their grading through our platform You're able to track student progress on a lesson and then also across a school year and we'll talk more about those features as well Finally common lit also has old just about 500 lessons that are written in Spanish and many of these are from the vast majority are from Authors who were born in Mexico or Latin America I'm going to go ahead and jump now to the common lit library and we'll just kind of explore some of the different resources that common lit has to offer First you'll notice that common lit English library has over 1,500 reading lessons Then as I kind of scroll down here, you're going to see just some of the most popular texts on common lit on this first page you'll see poetry from great authors like Tupac Shakur or Langston Hughes, you're also going to see great short stories by contemporary authors like JK Rowling Or Roald Dahl or Shirley Jackson or Langston Hughes You're also going to find Really great informational texts about influential people or important events in history like the Holocaust or Jackie Robinson or Malala So a really great mix of informational texts and literary texts. It's about 50% of each in the common lit library On the left hand side of the page. I can Browse the library in a variety of different ways. I can search by lexile level I can sort by the grade level difficulty of a text. I can also search by things like historical topics or by literary genres I Can search by a particular theme of a text Or by a comp or by a common core standard So there's many many different ways that I can browse the resources to find the perfect text that I'm looking for Since what I'll do for today's purposes is I'm going to search for a text that's between a thousand and a 1,200 lexile Specifically, I'm going to look for a short story And this is going to give me a 49 possible texts What I'm going to do for today is I'm going to choose the text Raymond's Run. It's a great short story. That's one of my favorites One thing that makes common lits reading program really effective is that all of it comes with a lot of really great lesson planning resources with each lesson And the lesson planning resource that you'll find with each lesson are very similar from lesson to lesson So you know what to expect At the top of the page, you're going to find a series of tools to support you. The first is paired texts paired texts are other texts from common lits library that share a similar theme or topic What we do is we take those other texts. We provide a little bit of background on that other text and then provide some Questions to help you compare help you and your students compare and contrast those texts to one another We also offer related media Related media are usually videos sometimes a song or sometimes a slide deck that help to introduce or provide an extension to the lesson We also provide an answer key and that's available to teachers after they register for common lit and verify that they're an adult If I go back to the lesson now I have a couple of choices. The first thing that I can do is I can download the lesson just about any lesson on common lit can be downloaded If I download it, it's extremely easy to use. You'll see here that there's the reading passage And then at the end of the story, oops, sorry about that. At the end of the story, you'll get a series of multiple choice questions That you can give to your students. These are all standards aligned and there's often a writing question as well And then there's a series of discussion questions. The discussion questions that we offer Are meant to be much more open-ended and allow students to make a connection to their lives or to the world around them I'm going to go back to the text now I'm going to go back to the text now The other thing that you can do is especially to support Distance learning or to support online learning in general You can assign a text through the common lit platform So for today, I'm going to go to I'm going to click the the the class that I would like to assign this to I also have the option to assign a lesson To individual students Um But for today, I'm going to assign it to my whole class In this box here, I can customize the directions or what I want students to take notes on as they're reading the text So I could I could tell students exactly when I want them to How I want them to complete the assignment what I want them to take notes on In this box I can also turn on a feature called guided reading mode Guided reading mode is a is one of common lits most popular features It's um, it provides students with a series of scaffolding questions to support their comprehension as they read It helps them hone in on the main ideas As they go through the text Then just this past week We released another feature that allows teachers to give the flexibility of assigning just the multiple choice questions Um, just the writing questions All of common lits questions or none of common lits questions So it just gives teachers a little more flexibility when working with their students For today, I'm just going to assign The the the writing question And then finally I'm going to choose a due date. I'll say that the assignment should be due next friday um If if your students are using lessons on common lit and they happen not to complete the lesson by that date They could still submit the assignment late, but when that assignment is submitted, it's flagged for you that the assignment came in past the due date Uh, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click the assign button Um bring our Amanda. Is are there any questions that we should address to the group? One one question that did come up that I wanted to make sure to highlight the Rob you covered a bit in the beginning of the presentation is there were some questions around what is common Who are we and who has access to our program? We are a non-profit. We're a 501c3 non-profit and our mission is to provide This website and associated resources completely free for teachers and students around the country in the world So all the teachers you work with and everyone on this call Does or should have access to our reading program Uh, we'll show you later on if you have any questions how you can get in contact with our support team But please know that this will always be free for you and your students So now I've assigned the lesson to my students And now I'm logged into a sample student account I'm going to show you a little bit about what it looks like to complete a lesson on the online platform So as a student, uh, actually first what I'll do is is uh, I can go if I'm a student to my performance page I can see how I've done on previous assignments So I can see how I've done on all of the lessons that I've already completed Um, I can also see all of the lessons that I haven't turned in yet that I need to work on And then at the bottom of the page, I can also track my progress. I can see how I'm doing by uh, uh standard On all of the common lessons that I've completed. So, um, I've completed, um three questions On rl one and I've gotten them all correct. Um, so I know I'm really doing really well on that standard But I can look at a different standard and I can see that I'm not doing as well on that standard So it's just a way for me to to track my progress If I'd like now I can go back to my assignments And I'm going to go ahead and start that lesson that my teacher assigned me. Uh, I'm going to click on the assignment Uh, a couple resources to point your attention towards at the top of the page uh To three really important tools The first is called read aloud students could listen to the text read To them. Uh, so I click on this button I'll play this out loud work to do around the house like some girls My mother does that and I don't have to earn my pocket money by hustling George runs errands for the big boys and sells christmas cards Um, so I could listen to the text or I can listen to the questions on the side of the page I can also translate the text Commonly offers digital translations in 27 different languages So I can choose a language that I would like to to translate the text to I'll choose chinese And I could read the text uh in chinese as I read the text in english Um, finally, I can also take notes on the text as I read. So, um, I Can say here the main character is describing her life And all of these notes that I take my teacher will be able to see I can also highlight portions of the text. Um, if I'd like to Now, um, which you'll see here on the right is what we call guided reading mode These are the questions that I mentioned a little bit earlier that appear for students to help scaffold their comprehension of the text So, uh, let's see Uh, the I believe the right answer to this question is C Yep, so I got this right on the second try. Um, after I got it wrong the first time I was prompted to look back at the text Um, all of the wrong answers that I make here are recorded for my teacher so that they can track My comprehension of the text as I'm reading If I continue to scroll through the text I get a little bit further. Um And then I get that question right on the first try And then I'm able to move right right along and my teacher sees that I comprehended that part of the text really well So within the text we provide some definitions and footnotes. You'll see here Um, there is we define the word, um, uh fit um Because it's an unfamiliar Uh definition of the word We'll also we also provide a definite or provide a footnote here for the term stage coach Since we know it's a term that some folks might not be familiar with. Um at the top of the page You can change the size of the text. So now, uh, we'll pretend that I have completed this lesson And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to switch back to My teacher platform I'll do that one second Okay, so now I'm back on my teacher platform I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to I'm going to pretend that I'm now ready That my students have completed the last lesson and I'm going to go ahead and begin Um, grading their last assignment. So I'm going to go to my classes And I'm going to click on my first block class because I want to grade their assignments and The lesson that my students most recently completed was the lottery by Shirley Jackson. So I'm going to go to uh view student annotations Here is where I can see all of the notes that students took as they were reading the text I could see what Corey's note was as he was reading this part of the text And I could comment back on his Uh notes to provide him with feedback where to push his ideas Um, and it's really easy to use um So here I'll tell And I could give them that feedback to push their ideas forward Next I can go to the grading page All of the multiple choice questions are going to grade automatically on common As soon as students complete it But we do prompt teachers to grade the writing questions and remember there's usually one or two writing questions per assignment Um, you'll see here that we provide an example our response So you can review these as you're grading your students writing Then here, um, you'll see all of your student writing samples stacked up And then you can easily score students from a scale to zero to four And if you'd like you could even provide a little bit of optional feedback To tell students how they can improve upon their work Um, I'll click save now that I've graded all of my students writing I can go ahead and click on the button here at the top that says view assignment report. Um, the view of the assignment report is one of the Um, coolest features on commonlet You're able to see how you're in detail how your students did on one lesson in a really easy to Comprehend way at the top of the page You can see how your students, uh Did it sort of overall I could see that my class average was an 81 I could see how students did on the multiple choice compared to the writing And I could see who who did really well in the assignment and who kind of struggled Here's where you can see how students did on the guided reading questions These questions are the ones that students answer as they read and I could see here that for a student perhaps like Angela's she got almost every question right on the very first try Which shows that her basic comprehension of the text was really strong She probably understood just about every main idea of the story If I look at a student here at the top like Sean Sean got about half of those questions wrong on the first try And it suggests that maybe his basic comprehension of the story Was pretty weak and he might need to read a portion of it or that this text might have been a little too hard for him If I scroll down a little bit further Um, I could see how students did on the standards aligned questions that they get at the end of the lesson Uh, you'll see that you can see with these questions. You can see how each student answered each question You can see how students did on the writing Um, and you can I can even send a lesson back to a student if I want them to give another try Um, uh because they they struggled on this assignment I can also see when students submitted the assignment and if students submitted it after the due date I would see here that their assignment was that their assignment was late Uh, next if I go back up to the top of the page If I go to student performance um One of the last really important features to check out is you can also see Uh, your grade book from across the school year. So if I look at my block one class again I can see Uh, how my class is doing overall I could see that my students are doing better on literary text than they're doing on informational texts Um, and I can see how students completed Uh each assignment of the year um One last feature is is that I can also go into a student an individual students report And I could see how they've done on I get a full report that I could print off That tells me how they did on each assignment And this is obviously really really really great for Like report cards or like progress reports that you might be filling out for students Okay, um with that I'm going to go over to our managed classes page This is when you create an account on commonlet This is the page that you'll be brought to and this is where you'll be prompted to set up your classes on commonlet You'll want to click on the button that says create a new class After you click on this button Um, there are there are really two different ways that a teacher can set up Their classes on commonlet. You can click on the button that says import classes from google classroom We highly recommend this feature Uh teachers who use the google integration with commonlet, uh, are tend to it tends to be a really really smooth integration That helps promote The usage of commonlet. It does a few things. The first is that uh, as a teacher you can sign in with single sign on as your as As can your students, um, you'll all be able to access your commonlet accounts with with a single sign on So you won't have to remember as the students won't have to remember their passwords The second is that um, you can import your classes directly from google classroom Which means that if you have your classes set up there Commonlet will make will take a copy of those classes. So each student doesn't have to go ahead and create their own account Third you can post any commonlet lesson to your google classroom stream Uh, which makes it really really easy, uh to to disseminate lessons to your students And then finally you can integrate your commonlet grade book with your google classroom grade book So any of the grades that students accumulate on commonlet will also populate in your google classroom grade book We are we do not have a full integration with canvas However, what you can do is with any lesson from a any commonlet lesson You can post those in in in google in sorry in canvas and it will route students Um to complete their lesson on commonlet. However, we don't have a full integration If you don't use google classroom and need to set up your classes a different way You can use the create a new class manually feature Once you click on that button You'll be given um, you'll uh, uh complete some basic information about the class. You'll name your class You'll say the grade level of the students that you teach and then you'll you'll enter here You'll get sorry you'll receive a class code with a class code That's how students will join your class. So students will go to the link We'll go to commonlet and then they'll click on the in on the create an account button That one after they create an account by providing their name and pass by by creating An account that has a name and password They'll enter the class code and with that class code They'll be they'll be routed to join your class Um, that pretty much wraps up today's presentation. Are there any additional questions? Or or things that I should address to the group winner. Amanda One one important thing to highlight I've seen a few questions regarding this if you try to sign up for commonlet During that process it asked you for your zip code to identify your school If you do not see your school when you enter your zip code, please email help at commonlet.org I will send that to everybody in the chat box If you email help at commonlet.org and give the zip code a name of your school Our team will help set that up for you to make sure you can create your account Uh, if you're the first person from your school, this this sometimes can occur So, please if you have any questions or if you have any issues when setting up your account Please email help at commonlet.org Which rob has also shown on the screen there. Yeah um It just a highlight brings point this might be particularly the case we because um, we have all of the schools That are traditional k-12 public schools. We might not have some adult education campuses In our in our database. Um, so please just email help at commonlet.org And we can help facilitate the creation of your account. Um in a very very short amount of time Here's a question. Is there a report that shows class and student performance by common core standard? Yeah, there is I can go back and I'd be happy to go ahead and show that Brynn, this is pennie. I have a quick question that might help some of our audience members as well On that previous answer you said about entering a zip code and not potentially finding an adult education campus Some of our schools are associated with k-12 districts So if they searched for that first might they then have a better chance that may not be the adult education School, but it would at least be their k-12 district that they're associated with Yes. Yes. So chances are if they are associated with a k-12 district, we will actually already have their school set up for them um If if they would like and they want to enter the zip code of their school district They can sign up at a different school in their district. There's not a problem there But if they do want to be associated with their adult education campus If it is not already showing up on that drop-down list our team is more than happy to set it up for them Perfect. Thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely Um on the screen right now, you'll this is the student performance tab. Um, so oops, sorry about that Underneath the the gradebook. I think you can see this chart This tells you how students are performing by common core standard Uh, so for example, there have been six questions answered about rl6 in my class And my students are getting 100 of those questions correct. Whereas with um rl5 Students are scoring 81 percent in my block one class I mean you could see those for all of the common core standards that students have been assessed on here The next question we have here is um Can you show again the button where you create a class? And click on the created create a new class button. Yep Perfect So if we close out of that rob just to highlight that once more for everybody When you log into common when your account is set up if you click on the my classes tab At the top of the page that we see there and then select manage classes You'll be able to see the create a new class button to set up your class Great There's another question. Is this program friendly or accessible with cell phones? That's a really great question It's one. It's something I forgot to address. Um Commonlet is is extremely mobile friendly There's uh, there's just one feature that doesn't work on On a phone or tablet students can't Annotate the text on a phone or tablet or really on or on any touchscreen However on a on a mobile device everything else works perfectly fine Students can read the passages answer the questions. Um, everything like that And another question that came up. Can I just post the the lesson pdf to my google classroom if I would like Yeah, that's a really great question too. Um, that is that's completely fine Uh, we it's it's it's perfectly okay for teachers to post lessons The post our pdf lessons in their google classrooms If you work at like a district level or you support multiple schools We have some restrictions around that. Uh, you can just email partnerships at commonlet.org If you're looking to post any lessons online for more than just your class of students Perfect the the next one I'm seeing here is could you please show again for everybody on the the presentation? How how students can annotate the text as they read? Yeah, sure thing I'm just going to switch my view for a second. So now I'm going back to my, uh, student uh platform here And uh here I can uh, all I have to do is just highlight a portion um Portion of the text and then click the t button and then I can say the main Character has a brother Named And I could save that note And then just as a reminder teachers will be able to see Any note that students make on the text could you also show? There's a question again to show how students make the font baker Yep, I can change it up here at the top of the page There's a question in order to set up in a care basically how do we go about setting up an account? Yep, uh, what I'll do is let me uh, let me open up a different browser All right, so I'm opening up a new browser and I'm going to commonlet and I won't be logged into an account here Uh If so since I don't have I'm not already logged into this account I'll have the option when I get to this page to click the the button that says create free account And then um, if I'm an educator, I'll just click the educator button And then here I'll enter my zip code um, so I'll I'll enter the A zip code and then that's going to give me the options for the schools that are in that zip code um If and from there I just provide a little bit of information about myself and my I provide my email address for my school Creative password, and then there's a couple questions after that and then I'll be able to create my class And just to reiterate what Bryn said before if you don't see your class on that list Just please email help at commonlet.org And we'll be able and our our support team will help you right away One of the two remaining questions I want to cover live is there's a question about whether there's a pre-assessment That you can use to determine a student's reading level. Yeah, that's a really good question This is a feature that we only have live on the site or this past year We actually we launched it and then we kept it live on our site from roughly Uh, September through November of the year We're going to relaunch this feature for the beginning of this upcoming school year Each pre-assessment on commonlet has about 25 questions or 20 to 25 questions And it it will tell you whether your your students are performing um performing compared to The students who took an assessment at that great level Perfect and the last question for everybody Uh, could could you highlight again? How students access their accounts there are two questions regarding how students set up their accounts on commonlet And whether they're the same accounts the teachers have great question. So let me switch back to my student account um If I go into All right. So uh, here's a the home page of commonlet if i'm a student I'm going to go to the button here that says login And uh If i'm a student I can I can enter my username that I get when I when I uh this come I'll know my username once I register for commonlet and then I can enter my password And then I can manually enter my commonlet account if uh, I have uh, if my school Uses google and my teacher imported my my class with google classroom Then I won't even need to enter my username and password oops I can just click the login button If my my school uses google and I have I have I my my account was created with a google account I can just click this login with google button and that will route me into my commonlet account We we really do appreciate everyone joining us today to quickly re-emphasize from the beginning of the call We're we're a non-profit. So it is completely free for your team to use our resources We're we're excited to support you and your students in any way that we can Especially during what we know are some pretty unprecedented times right now with this unexpected transition to remote instruction We'll we'll share Rob will share his screen again with the different support pages For the different emails you can use to reach our team I'll also be sending a few resources Including our faqs page in the chat box So you can copy that if you want to access our faqs page at any point. Great. I'm going to go ahead and rob Sorry rob. This is penny pierce and again I know one question that's come up and and I know it has uh, it's near and dear to the hearts of our adult educators here In california regarding your back end database of tracking students as they're working online And that's a time on task feature. Do you I didn't notice it when you were showing the screen? But as far as I could tell um commonlet does not have a how much time did a learner spend on a particular lesson, correct? No, the only data around like time that we uh reveal is when the student submitted the assignment When they submitted it. Okay. Thank you rob All right, everyone. We're very happy that we were able to share this resource with our california field This is exciting for adult ed and i'm so happy that commonlet is supporting our adult educators and our adult students using this program Thanks so much again for having us today You're welcome. Thank you. Yes. Thank you so much We hope to collaborate some more in the future Same here Oh, I am sure our adult educators in california will be happy to provide with ideas and and Recommendations, they're usually pretty vocal about things like that in a very positive way So I think they'll definitely want to see some new features if at all possible. So keep your programmers busy. I suppose Sounds good to me